Wednesday, 25 September 2013

INTERVIEW - Heinz Riegler (part 2)

Here is the second and final installation of the interview I conducted with Heinz Riegler on a sunny August afternoon at Jamie's Espresso. The focus here is on the Open Frame festival and its curator Lawrence English, and future projects.

SONIC MASALA
– I’ll come back to this, but I wanted to briefly talk about Open Frame as
well. You are playing with Francisco Lopez and Angel Eyes…what Lawrence does is
amazing, and in a bizarre way I think it’s underappreciated? In what he is able
to bring to Brisbane. It’s always been a situation that Brisbane has a “scene”,
even when I arrived at the dying stages of the 20th century as a
fresh-faced kid, it was still very much a Custard, even Not From There, type of
environment, which of course was great and I appreciated it then, but thinking
of that space then to now, seeing artists like Mark McGuire and Lopez, Benoit
Piourlard and High Wolf – I couldn’t imagine such a thing happening ten years
ago. Yet Lawrence and a few others like him are creating these pockets of existence,
and I think that is amazing that Brisbane is a part of that.

HEINZ RIEGLER – For me to start talking about Lawrence and the work he is doing, his own
output, what he is facilitating, I gush, I tend to go into these…I don’t want
him to feel too good about himself (laughs). But I think what he brings to the
table is outstanding and I feel – I have been friends with Lawrence for a long
time and we’ve done work together in the past – every time he encourages me to
make something to create something with him or through his channels, I'm very
honoured and pleased to be working with him because I have an enormous amount
of respect for the guy. If we talk about Open Frame and the events he brings to
Brisbane, I think it’s…I remember seeing Chris Watson, who used to be Cabaret
Voltaire a long time ago, and he does a lot of field recordings now, and
manipulates them into quite musical pieces. I think it was an Open Frame at the
Powerhouse (in 2009) – I remember sitting up there as the guy presented his
work, and it was recordings coming from four speakers set out in the room, and
the room was packed with people sitting on cushions. I went up to Lawrence
after the show and told him “All these people? You made this thing happen,
you’ve made it a consistent reality in Brisbane.” It’s a really wonderful thing
that it happens in this town. It was the first time I realised that – here I go
again, I don’t want to boost his ego – but he brings an enormous amount to this
town. Anyone who is half interested in music or art would have to acknowledge
that. And I'm not sure when you say underappreciated, because I haven’t been
back here for that long, but I do go to his events and people seem to be
embracing what he is bringing here…

SM
– I guess I'm implying that in the current climate it still remains, he is
lorded in the right channels, but you would certainly like to have a situation
whereby the Open Frame Festival is openly celebrated in mainstream media. It is
never going to be mainstream, but
it’s another element to Brisbane that should be overtly embraced. I mean, those
shows he puts on at the Powerhouse or over at the IMA (Institute of Modern Art
in the Fortitude Valley)…I mean, he managed to bring Grouper to Brisbane, the
only show she played in Australia – what a coup! And she played the exact
opposite to what she has played in her entire career to date, much of which
comes from her latest album (The Man Who Died In His Boat), and it polarised the audience – but that is
the beauty and majesty of music, and it’s great that we can have it here in
Podunk Brisbane.

HR
– Yes! (laughs) When I hear that people would be disappointed in that
performance, that it gets that kind of reaction, that this sort of music or
creation, that they would not want to get caught up in a new stage from an
artist, I thought that was the pop music world where people get upset when the
artists doesn’t play the hits.

SM
– (laughs) It was funny to see some of the reactions. I mean in fairness she
did abjectly refuse to play anything that had defined her up to that point…

HR
– Yeah, but it is still a disappointing response from people. I have seen shows
with Lawrence, some of the early Room40 shows with artists like David Toop,
Scanner; and we are talking about filling rooms in Brisbane, about making quite
challenging work at times. I played at the Open Frame in London a couple years
ago, and it was quite packed. So it isn’t just Brisbane, he is moving things on
a global scale.

SM
– When you see things written about Lawrence in publications like The Wire, that really excites me because
often I even forget he is from Brisbane. He is certainly one of a kind but he
is – I mean, I love Brisbane, for its weaknesses as much as for its strengths…

HR
– So does he, you know…

SM
– He is someone who is working outside of the slipstream of, well, I'm not
going to say the Brisbane “scene”, that isn’t what I mean – so when I read
about him and listen to his last actual album album, The Peregrine, then
reading about it when travelling through Europe in various magazines and blogs,
then his last couple of field recording releases (Songs Of The Living/Songs Of
The Lived – reviewed by us here)…

HR
– There is a bit on there where he came up to the cabin with his wife actually.

SM
– My favourite part from those recordings has nothing to do with field recordings
per se, it’s the one where he’s captured the sound of one of his microphones falling
over ('Microphone Collapsing Into Grass Sinclair Wetlands New Zealand'), and it’s this slow disintegration of sound, you feel this open space
and because the mic is going into the ground, the grass, the dirt, and the
rustling of Lawrence trying to set it back up again, I thought it was
brilliant. This unguarded moment captured in audio. And it’s things like that
that amazes me. But enough about Lawrence…

HR
– Yeah, fuck Lawrence!

SM
– (laughs) OK, well, I'm really intrigued to see where, with those few elements
where you had the isolation of the Austrian Alps, from technology as well as
from people, physical noise and mental noise, to doing this installation which
funnily enough was indirectly impacted by the environment from the landslide
anyway, another added moment, then Sleep Health designed to help you sleep – I
get the sense that you don’t really pick and choose your projects, something
just takes interest or suddenly appears and that becomes an obsession for a
while?

HR
– It’s an interesting kind of time for me. I have spent a great portion of the
2000s saying no to things, and feeling unable to complete things. It’s starting
to over the past few years to say yes to almost everything that comes my way,
within reason. I've chosen to say yes and it’s a remarkable thing that happens
when you start doing that; you are taken out of thinking, you are put into
positions that you otherwise wouldn’t be in, and there is something always
imparted on you. I'm less concerned with the quality of the outcome as I am in
putting myself into interesting situations. I'm less concerned about what
stands at the end of that , but I don’t think I’ll have much time to consider
that because I’ll be onto the next thing. Maybe one day I’ll make something
really good, but maybe not, and it makes you really free. If you get glimpses
of that, and avoid getting really anal about how something continues to sound
like or looks like, if you are able to put yourself into a “well, it’s not that
important or crucial’ thinking space, you become free in what you can and can’t
do. A lot of fear falls away, and when the fear falls away you start to work on
things that you otherwise wouldn’t have attempted and you may fail, but I may
fall over and be dead in 24 hours, anything is possible. Fuck it.

SM
– So what’s next?

HR
– I was going to be flying out of here pretty soon, but I think I'm going to be
here for a couple of months extra, with a couple of projects coming to light
that I’d really like to follow up on. I'm doing one show in Sydney and one in
Melbourne to support these records that are coming out, and planning a couple
of other site-specific things that may be happening here next year. The one
really concrete thing is that I’ll be in Europe again for the winter, and a
friend of mine who is an architect, he doesn’t really build things rather than
follow the theory, and he teaches at Bauhaus, he’s a fascinating cat who
happens to end up living in my hometown village and we reconnected. We did this
thing a couple years ago. He is this really sought after guy so he always has
these interns coming and going from all over Europe wanting to work in his
office, and we all came up with this idea of having film work being displayed
in some kind of architectural development that had been constructed out of snow
and ice. We made this thing called -20 Degree Cinema, basically it tended to be
a party for all of us, and we ended up sourcing some short films and video art,
and architects designed this cinema in the open air, the seating was all built
out of snow, there was a workshop kind of environment, and we had this
screening of hours long of a bunch of shorts and video art. So we are doing
that again, but this time we are wrapping it up a bit. I'm looking to have a
life that is transient between Europe and Australia, so I will need things to
do while I'm here and while I'm there that is the first thing, this strange
hybrid festival built around architecture, film and video art.

SM
– And that’ll be in your hometown again.

HR
– It is, this tiny village in the Alps. There will be an open call for people
to submit work, and it will expand in the sense that it won’t be a straight up
16 x 9 cinema screen, it’ll be more objects that will be projected on, maybe
even projections from within objects…So that is concrete. There is already a
project for early next year here in Australia for documenting the floods in
Bundaberg with a photographer friend of mine Brad Marsellos that centres around
North Bundaberg and the destruction centred around there. There’ll be a sound
work for this in conjunction with some photography of his. That’s firming up
also. My dream is to have an eternal winter – six months in Europe then six
months here. Mainly so I miss the wretched heat here in Brisbane. We’ll see.

________________________________________________________________One other project that Riegler has on the go is artwork - he is launching Sisyphus/Unlearning. It will be at the same venue this interview took place, Jamie's Espresso, on Thursday October 3 from 6pm.

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It was early on a Sunday morning at ATP - A Nightmare Before Christmas 2009. After downing a fair few, at 4am we decided to cook a curry. It was during the consumption of this drunkenly delicious breakfast treat that we decided to actually do something about the music we talk about all the time.

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